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Accessibility services are a feature of the Android framework designed to
provide alternative navigation feedback to the user on behalf of applications
installed on Android devices. An accessibility service can communicate to the
user on the application's behalf, such as converting text to speech, or haptic
feedback when a user is hovering on an important area of the screen. This
lesson covers how to create an accessibility service, process information
received from the application, and report that information back to the
user.

Create Your Accessibility Service

An accessibility service can be bundled with a normal application, or created
as a standalone Android project. The steps to creating the service are the same
in either situation. Within your project, create a class that extends AccessibilityService.

Like any other service, you also declare it in the manifest file.
Remember to specify that it handles the android.accessibilityservice intent,
so that the service is called when applications fire an
AccessibilityEvent.

If you created a new project for this service, and don't plan on having an
application, you can remove the starter Activity class (usually called MainActivity.java) from your source. Remember to
also remove the corresponding activity element from your manifest.

Configure Your Accessibility Service

Setting the configuration variables for your accessibility service tells the
system how and when you want it to run. Which event types would you like to
respond to? Should the service be active for all applications, or only specific
package names? What different feedback types does it use?

@Override
public void onServiceConnected() {
// Set the type of events that this service wants to listen to. Others
// won't be passed to this service.
info.eventTypes = AccessibilityEvent.TYPE_VIEW_CLICKED |
AccessibilityEvent.TYPE_VIEW_FOCUSED;
// If you only want this service to work with specific applications, set their
// package names here. Otherwise, when the service is activated, it will listen
// to events from all applications.
info.packageNames = new String[]
{"com.example.android.myFirstApp", "com.example.android.mySecondApp"};
// Set the type of feedback your service will provide.
info.feedbackType = AccessibilityServiceInfo.FEEDBACK_SPOKEN;
// Default services are invoked only if no package-specific ones are present
// for the type of AccessibilityEvent generated. This service *is*
// application-specific, so the flag isn't necessary. If this was a
// general-purpose service, it would be worth considering setting the
// DEFAULT flag.
// info.flags = AccessibilityServiceInfo.DEFAULT;
info.notificationTimeout = 100;
this.setServiceInfo(info);
}

Starting with Android 4.0, there is a second option available: configure the
service using an XML file. Certain configuration options like
canRetrieveWindowContent are only available if you
configure your service using XML. The same configuration options above, defined
using XML, would look like this:

If you go the XML route, be sure to reference it in your manifest, by adding
a <meta-data> tag to
your service declaration, pointing at the XML file. If you stored your XML file
in res/xml/serviceconfig.xml, the new tag would look like this:

Query the View Heirarchy for More Context

This step is optional, but highly useful. One of the new features in Android
4.0 (API Level 14) is the ability for an
AccessibilityService to query the view
hierarchy, collecting information about the UI component that generated an event, and
its parent and children. In order to do this, make sure that you set the
following line in your XML configuration:

android:canRetrieveWindowContent="true"

Once that's done, get an AccessibilityNodeInfo object using getSource(). This call only
returns an object if the window where the event originated is still the active
window. If not, it will return null, so behave accordingly. The
following example is a snippet of code that, when it receives an event, does
the following:

Immediately grab the parent of the view where the event originated

In that view, look for a label and a check box as children views

If it finds them, create a string to report to the user, indicating
the label and whether it was checked or not.

If at any point a null value is returned while traversing the view
hierarchy, the method quietly gives up.